American Architecture: Studies

by Montgomery Schuyler

THE PEOPLE’S CHURCH, ST. PAUL.

J. W. Stevens, Architect.

As was remarked in the paper on Chicago, the architectural activity of the West is not largely ecclesiastical, and the churches are for the most part as near to traditional models as their designers have the knowledge to bring them. In the Eastern States a great many interesting essays have been made towards solving the modern problem of a church in which the pulpit and not the altar is the central point of design, while yet retaining an ecclesiastical expression. There is an edifice in St. Paul called “the People’s Church,” in which the designer seems purposely to have avoided an ecclesiastical expression, and to have undertaken to typify in brick and stone the wild, free theology of the West. He has so far succeeded that nobody could possibly take the result of his labors for a church in the usual acceptation of the term, but this negative attainment does not yet constitute a positive architectural success. It may be that Western ideas in theology are thus far somewhat too sketchy to form a basis for the establishment of an architectural type, since mere negation is insusceptible of architectural expression. The People’s Church does not lack, however, many of the qualities that should belong to every building as a building, apart from its destination. In spite of such unhappy freaks as that by which the stone basement merges into the brick superstructure with no architectural mark of the transition, and cuts the openings quite at random, or as that by which the brick wall, for a considerable but indefinite extent, is quite promiscuously aspersed with irregular bits of stone, it shows a considerable skill in the placing and detailing of features, and the disposition of the openings gives the principal front a grateful sense of stability and repose. The ample entrances designate it as a place of popular assembly, and possibly its religious purpose may be taken to be confessed, though somewhat shamefacedly, in the wheel-window at the centre of one front, and the tall traceried opening at the centre of the other, which are the only relics of ecclesiastical architecture that are suffered to appear. It is evident that it is a “People’s” something, and possibly this is as near to a specification of its purpose as the neo-theologians have attained. In this case, as it is notoriously difficult for a man to give expression to an idea of which he is not possessed, the architectural ambiguity is assuredly not to be imputed to the architect.

A Unitarian church in Minneapolis is also an unconventional specimen of church architecture, though it could not be taken for anything but a church, and it is undeniably a vigorous performance, consisting of massive, well-divided, and “well-punched” walls in a monochrome of dark-red sandstone. The novelty and the unconventionally, however, seem, both in composition and in detail, to have been sought rather than

UNITARIAN CHURCH, MINNEAPOLIS.

L. S. Buffington, Architect.

to have proceeded from the conditions of the problem, and the effect is so far marred by the loss of the naturalness and straightforwardness that justify a departure from convention. For example, even in a galleried church the division into two stories can scarcely be considered the primary fact of the building, though this division is the primary fact of this design, and is emphasized by the torus that is the most conspicuous moulding. Nevertheless, there is much felicity in the general disposition and in the design of the features, especially in the open fenestration of the transept gable, and its strong contrast with the solider flanks of wall pierced only by the smaller openings that indicate the gallery staircases, the slope of which is also expressed in the masonry of the wall itself; and the low polygonal tower effectually unites and dominates the two fronts. The innovation in the treatment of detail, by which what is commonly the “wrought work” of a building in facile sandstone is left rough-faced, is a caprice that seems also to proceed from the pursuit of novelty, and that gains nothing in vigor for what it loses in refinement. A rough-faced moulding seems to be a contradiction in terms; yet here not only are the mouldings rough-faced, but also the columns and colonnettes, and the corbelled pinnacles that detach the tower and the gables, and it is only in the copings of these that the asperities of the sandstone are mitigated. Slovenliness is not vigor, and in the coarsening of this detail the designer, in spite of having produced a vigorous and interesting work, exposes himself to the critical amenity bestowed by Dryden upon Elkanah Settle, that “his style is boisterous and rough-hewn.”

A more conventional and a quite unmistakable example of church building is a Presbyterian church in St. Paul, which follows the established ecclesiastical type, albeit with a recognition of the modern demand that a church shall be a good place in which to preach and to be preached to—a demand which here, as often elsewhere, is met by shortening the arms of the cruciform plan until the church is virtually limited to the crossing. It is no disparagement to the present design to say that in its general composition it seems to have been suggested by—and at any rate it suggests—an early and interesting work of Mr. Richardson’s, a church in Springfield, Massachusetts, upon which it improves at some points, notably in the emphatic exposition of the masonic structure. At other points the variation is not so successful. The tower at Springfield, with its attached turret, the entrance arch at its base, and the broach spire with pinnacles detached over the squinches, is a very vigorous piece of design. In the corresponding feature at St. Paul, the relation between the two superposed open stages is not rhythmic or felicitous, though each in itself is well modelled, and the transition from the tower to the shingled spire, marked by shingled pinnacles without a parapet, is distinctly unfortunate. For all that, the church is a studied and scholarly performance.